Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released its plan to establish policies to ensure public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, as required by the February 2013 White House directive. The plan calls for researchers to deposit final accepted manuscripts (or published articles) into the Department of Energy’s “PAGES” repository – a dark archive – with public access to be provided via links to publisher’s websites. All articles will be made available to the public no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

FASTR is calling for federal agencies with extramural research budgets in excess of $100 million to establish consistent, permanent public access policies for articles reporting on their funded research.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today released a long-anticipated policy that will require its grantees to make their peer-reviewed research papers freely available within 12 months of publication in a journal. The agency is not creating its own public archive of full-text papers, but instead will send those searching for papers to publishers’ own websites.

The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to making knowledge of all forms freely available to the world. Beginning today, our new Open Access Policy will ensure that all research work produced with support from the Wikimedia Foundation will be openly available...

A bipartisan coalition of Senate and House members, including Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on Wednesday introduced the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act, a bill to improve public access to federally funded research.

SPARC, an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication, today applauded the reintroduction of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act, which would ensure that public access to research articles becomes the law of the land.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has released a “draft plan” outlining steps it will take to establish policies to ensure public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, as required by the February 2013 White House directive. While the Department is careful to note that “the proposed plan is a draft, ” and is subject to further revision, it lays out a strong framework for the implementation of a DoD-maintained article repository, as well as a comprehensive approach to ensure access and productive reuse of DoD-funded research data.

Ross Mounce, a postdoc at the University of Bath, recently wrote about how Elsevier charged him $31.50 for an “open access” research article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (BY-NC-ND) license. Mounce was understandably upset, because the article was originally published by another publisher – John Wiley – and was made available freely on their website. Elsevier’s act of charging for access initially appeared improper because of Wiley’s use of a noncommercial license.